IN THE MID-’80s, when compact discs were starting to catch on, some music lovers complained that album art would become a casualty of smaller packaging.

They may have been right. There are still memorable covers from the CD era, such as Nirvana’s swimming baby on its “Nevermind” disc, but seemingly not as many as there once were.

Video games haven’t been around as long as rock’n’ roll, but they’ve had plenty of chances to establish their own cover art as a form of self-expression.

Unfortunately, they haven’t.

There are few pieces of game box art that can compete with the iconic nature of impossible-to-forget album covers like Journey’s “Escape” or Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.”

Where album cover artists often strive to convey a mood, game art tends to fall into one of a few categories:

– Everything plus the kitchen sink: Some publishers feel every aspect of their game should be represented in the box art. If the game has aliens, ninjas, robots, pirates and dinosaurs, they try to squeeze them all in the picture like some alternate-universe Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

– Product tie-in: A complete no-brainer, both to create or to look at. If you liked the movie, TV show, etc, just use the art from whatever it is you’re promoting. And that makes sense: Like a bottle of Night Train, if you have refined taste, you probably won’t be buying it anyway. If not, you need to be able to easily find the game.

– Abstract: Most box art is representational. When it isn’t, I wonder, why don’t they want me to know what this game’s about?

– The main character: If your protagonist is Mario, Lara Croft or Master Chief, you really don’t have to do anything but put them on the cover.

– Minimalist: Just a name and maybe a symbol.

Oddly it’s the last category that has created the most memorable game art. Most gamers recognize the “Half Life” symbol, Zelda’s Triforce or the glyph in “Quake” that looks like the Van Halen logo. But few could — without looking — exactly describe the cover art for even some of the best-selling games. What’s on the cover of “Dead or Alive 4” for the Xbox 360 or “Rise of Legends” for the PC? I have no idea, and I own both games.

Some of my favorite pieces of box art were from the classic Atari age. Because the games themselves tended to have you controlling a lumpy dot, the box art was needed to give you an idea of what you were supposed to be looking at.

In Atari’s “Adventure,” the box showed a coiled dragon lording over a hedge maze, clutching a key. Its tail was wrapped around a dead tree, while adventurers approached from a castle in the distance.

Of course in the game, there were no trees, the dragons looked like ducks and the hero was a yellow square, but like the best album art, the box cover set a mood.

Even relatively mundane games looked great on an Atari box. Often they were collages of things that weren’t actually in the game, but that you imagined happening behind the scenes.

At http://www.vgboxart.com, amateurs celebrate their love for box art by creating their own takes on cover art for popular games. In the future, such sites may be the only place box art can be found. Like music, games are drifting toward digital distribution, but unlike audiophiles, if and when game boxes disappear, few gamers will mourn — or perhaps even notice — their passing.

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